Don’t know what Klout is or why you should care?
If you have Klout, you may be automatically upgraded to a better room at a Las Vegas hotel. Your Klout score may get you preferential treatment the next time you call into a customer service center. People with Klout have been eligible for a free Spotify invitation, a free Virgin America flight and free Starbucks coffee. Some job candidates are even putting their Klout scores on their resumes.
Here are five things every small business person should know about Klout, the hot social media influence service.
1. Klout is a social metrics service that’s getting a lot of attention
Based in San Francisco, Klout is a social media analytics company founded in 2007. Klout is currently in beta and free to use. To start using the service, just go to Klout’s home page and sign up using either your Twitter or Facebook account.
Klout uses multiple variables gathered from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and, most recently, Foursquare to assess the influence of an individual or brand across those networks. The end result: Klout assigns you a score — or what it calls its ‘influence metric’ — from 1 to 100. Klout has announced it will soon be adding metrics from YouTube, Google+ and Facebook Pages to its scoring system.
How hard is it to get a 100 Klout score? Let’s put it this way: It doesn’t hurt to be Justin Bieber.
In recent months, Klout has received a lot of mainstream press from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Forbes. The privately held company’s social scoring system makes for lively copy.
“If you have a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account, you are already being judged — or will be soon,” wrote The New York Times.
“So much for wealth, looks or talent,” wrote The Wall Street Journal. “Today, a new generation of VIPs is cultivating coolness through the world of social media. Here, ordinary folks can become ‘influential’ overnight depending on the number and kinds of people who follow them on Twitter or comment on their Facebook pages.”
2. Klout isn’t about having lots of Twitter followers or Facebook friends
Klout measures True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score. True Reach has to do with how many followers you have who “actively listen and react to your messages,” according to Klout’s own scoring definition. Amplification Probability has to do with how likely your messages will generate retweets, @messages, Facebook Likes and comments. The Network Score is an indication of how influential your followers are. In short, your Klout score is “highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.”
As described by Klout CEO Joe Fernandez to Forbes writer Tracey John, a Klout score boils down to this: How likely is it the content you create on social networks will cause others to take action, whether it’s clicking a link you posted or retweeting your tweets? And how influential are the people whom you incite into action? “The thing with Klout is you only get a good score if other influential people are reacting to your content. It makes it really, really hard to game the system,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez added that “we actually don’t care how many Twitter followers or Facebook friends you have. What we care about is who interacts with you. You might have 10,000 friends, but if no one responds or interacts with you, it doesn’t matter.”
To put a finer point on it, Fernandez said someone with thousands of social media connections might still be outscored by someone with just two connections — if those two connections happened to be Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
3. Klout isn’t the only social scoring system
For now, Klout is receiving the most attention among social scoring services. But here are some others to check out:
- Tweetlevel and Bloglevel, both from the Edelman PR firm, measure your influence in Twitter and the blogosphere, respectively.
- PeerIndex scores you based on your influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora, as well as blogs and other URLs you add.
- Tweet Grader from HubSpot ranks you according to how influential you are on Twitter.
- Twitter Counter includes both free and a variety of paid Twitter statistics services, ranging from $15 to $150 a month.
